I found the greatest tool that helps greatly in testing and validating changes in fixing before implementing them on your website. This entire software package is a web server in a box you have your apache web server, mysql server, perl, php, phpmyadmin and more. It took me about 5mins to setup the whole thing up.
Checkout Xampp here: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html
I use this daily and have a copy of my website on my machine and make all changes to it and validate and just upload the changed files. One it's great so you don't mess up your live site and two you always have a running version of your site just incase something happens you can just upload the files.... as long as you didn't mess up both versions
-D1-
